King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher: review

Lucy Daniel loves King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher.

In Philip Hensher’s seventh novel the sleepy, picturesque Devon estuary town of Hanmouth, beloved of retired gentlefolk and artsy types, “the perpetrators of macramé”, is the perfect setting for the author’s latest dissection of the pretensions, peccadilloes and petty snobberies of provincial England.

When an eight-year-old girl goes missing from the encroaching housing estates, barely acknowledged as part of the same town by the more affluent Hanmouthites, Hensher brilliantly skewers the bizarrely festive media and public reaction. Neighbourhood Watch installs CCTV on every spare surface, camera phones snap in the faces of the missing girl’s family, and a man watches them leave the police press conference, as if they are celebrities.

What follows is a frequently hilarious, swooping panorama of the townsfolk and their interactions. Hensher stops short of surveying the hierarchies of the town’s cake-makers and batik-printers, “as an anthropologist might go among the Kikuyu”, but there is a prevailing atmosphere of social observation.

“Sam relished these moments of embarrassing social disposition”, we are told of Gay Sam, who runs the cheese shop. Humiliation and embarrassment are also Hensher’s speciality; private disappointments and people “letting themselves down” in public, is the phrase used by Billa, the Brigadier’s wife. One of the chief pleasures of Hensher’s style is his ear for conversation, rather than mere dialogue. Sam and Billa are among the handful of characters we get to know best in the novel’s vast cast. Even they are found wriggling on the prongs of Hensher’s satire.

As the story unfolds, abduction looks more like parental greed. Then it takes another, darker twist. The central theme of surveillance has its built-in irony: the omniscient narrative allows novelist and reader to infringe multiple privacies. Novel-reading makes voyeurs of us all. Witness teenage Hettie, alone in her bedroom, serving up justice, with a hairpin, on her dolls (whose names include Bloodstained Victim and Child Pornography). John Calvin, the aptly named chair of Neighbourhood Watch, given to “outbreaks into voices”, is a wonderfully sinister creation, but his CCTV obsession is deflated by our view behind his front door. Hensher tells us that the cameras did not see one of his characters fall into the arms of his male lover, “But you did, and I did.”

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The characters are all looking for ways of being private, and being free, while also craving sociability: Catherine and Alec, who long to be accepted by the book club; their fat son David, the novel’s most tragic character and the source of its most piercing humour, whose particular sexual exclusion is so well written it seems a shame it has so little, really, to do with the rest of the book – we are off to the gay bars of Vauxhall and Soho. But the scene in which David watches the implausibly hot Italian posing as his boyfriend turn his parents’ housewarming party into the prelude for a gay bear orgy is brilliantly seditious.

This, though not exactly a state of the nation novel, is a book which could only have been written by someone as well versed in the literature of Englishness as Hensher is. Snobbery is part of the book’s subject, but there’s a hint of snobbery in its own lack of interest in delving very far into the lives of the estate’s inhabitants, and the sort of ebullient comic vision that allows Hensher’s narrator to call one of his own characters a “moonfaced reprobate”. That said, even the most grotesque of his grotesques has the ring of truth.

Preternaturally exact in its exposing of personal foibles, the novel lacks, perhaps, the emotional ballast of a character with whom the reader can fully empathise, without worrying that Hensher is about to winkle out of them some ridiculous shortcoming. Perhaps this creates a necessary restraint. Despite the snubs and disappointments the novel inflicts on its characters, it is kind-hearted, though not all it contains is benevolent. Each character in this astute, complex and enjoyable novel imposes him or herself with some sort of reality, even those we only glimpse through their kitchen windows.